INSTALLATION "SELEKTION - NINTH OF NOVEMBER NIGHT" BETWEEN LUDWIG MUSEUM AND THE DOME OF COLOGNE

09. November 1988Ludwig Museum, Cologne A 100 meter wall of pictures between between Museum Ludwig and the Dome of Cologne, 1988With the Installation "Ninth of November Night" Gottfried Helnwein wanted to remind us of the "Reichskristallnacht"( "Cristal Night"), November 9th to 10th, 1938.He has consciously foregone using documentary archive material. He is chiefly interested in the attitude behind the catastrophe, the roots of the holocaust - the delusion that one is able to measure the worthiness or unworthiness of humans by the form of the nose and ears, by the hair and colour of the eyes. The perverse "healing precept of the chosen Nordic race", which vouched for the pure and the good, and described a whole gamut of lives not worth living, and which were considered to be the source of all evils such as crime, immorality and even illness. The cleansed of inferior genotypes. For a long time Gottfried Helnwein has been occupied in his work with the theme of fascism and violence. In his installation "Ninth November Night", he has made use of a rather subtle, and perhaps because of this, a particularly moving language. He confronts the passers-by with larger-than-life childrens' faces in a seemingly endless row; children as if made to "line up to be sorted" in a concentration camp. Placed, so to speak, opposite these faces, which force the observer into frontal eye contact, is the enlargement of a schematic illustration from the "Text Book of the Sub-Human" - "shapes of buttocks; A. of the lower B. of the higher race."

It was to our good fortune that Gottfried Helnwein also strove to break away from the museum and gallery sector in order to communicate with a larger public. This appeared on a grand scale on the site between the cathedral and Museum Ludwig, and at a time of "photokina", with its hundreds of thousands of visitors. The 100 metre picture wall did not fail to hit its mark: it induced bewilderment as well as aggressiveness. After a few days numerous pictures had been slashed, one even stolen. Gottfried Helnwein saw the exhibition as a process which would continue and be reflected in later presentations. The pictures were not renewed, but patched up, so that this reminder of the persecution of Jewish people would bear the traces of a lack of insight and understanding in the present day.

"In the struggle against the Jew, I defend the acts of God!" Those were Hitler's words in Mein Kampf.

I admire the work of Gottfried Helnwein a great deal. This photographic testimony encourages reflection and provokes the examination of conscience, which is necessary for every one of us where racism is concerned.

Not even the children were spared; they, too, fell victim to the destruction. It was Gottfried Helnwein's fantastic idea to present the consequences to this "period without mercy" in such an unconventional manner. He made no use of photos of heaped corpses; children's portraits force the observer to stop and consider this idea. The fury with which the neo-nazis reacted to these portraits is understandable inasmuch as it is the very same fury with which they have for years been fighting against The Diary of Anne Frank; the murder of children rouses abhorrence and conflict in every human, whether they are motivated by ideology or insanity. The urge to destroy has survived; the portraits bear witness to its rage - an attempt was made to cut them to shreds. "People, please, stop,... look at these children's faces, multiply their number by a few hundred thousand. Only then will you realise or gain an inkling of the extent of this holocaust, of the greatest tragedy in human history!"